“ZZ TOP! ZZ TOP!” by Tim Blair, The Telegraph, April 26, 2012

• Do economists lie more? – “Yes. And it seems the effect is causal: studying business and economics makes you more likely to lie”
• Who Needs a Warrant? Florida Cop Dresses As Power Company Repairman to Gain Access to Home
• Election hacked, drunken robot elected to DC school board

• Change of Habit – “Humility. Lent. The Red Carpet. Hollywood just cannot get nuns right.” (See Dolores Hart.)
• Sandra Fluke Does Not Speak for Me – “[Sandra Fluke's] one claim to fame in the reproductive health care debate is…drumroll, please…being a student club leader! You go, Sandra! Hang those posters girl. Wear out those Sharpies. Me? I love me some extracurricular involvement. The difference between Sandra and me is that I don’t think it qualifies me to speak in front of Congress. ‘The Chair calls to the stand the captains of the intramural ultimate frisbee team!’ … Sandra Fluke doesn’t speak for me. Or for Georgetown.”
• Candidate Putin on The State of The World – “Victory in this week’s Presidential election is almost certain, but the Prime Minister is no longer the absolute master of Russian politics. Not only does he face a protest movement that includes some of the most thoughtful and creative people in his country; the old techniques don’t seem to be working anymore. As a recent German documentary shows, Putin’s old routine of judo, swimming, and hunting polar bears ‘no longer comes across as virile but, rather, as exhausting and joyless.’” Hmmm, “exhausting and joyless” describes a lot of political behavior….
• Geithner’s Latest Alibi – “In Ron Suskind’s [Confidence Men], on how Geithner, Larry Summers, and company protected Wall Street, Suskind quotes an appalled Senator Byron Dorgan telling President-elect Obama in December 2008, ‘You’ve picked the wrong people!’ Did he ever. Geithner keeps proving that over and over again.”

• The Gray Divorcés – “The divorce rate for people 50 and over has doubled in the past two decades. Baby boomers are breaking up late in life like no generation before.”
• What body language signals motivation, social skills and conscientiousness in a job applicant? – “talking, gesturing, and dress were indeed valid cues for social skills, but only the formality of dress predicted the applicant’s work motivation”
• People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy – “It is interesting that progressives think citizens are much too stupid to make their own choices in the grocery store.”
• It’s time to fix the Bill of Rights – “I propose that we have a meeting of all the great minds (college professors, A-list Hollywood actors, people who watch ‘Downton Abbey’) to list everything people need — basics like food, transportation, and smart phones.”
• Bill of Rights Card, from Two Seas Media

• Lessons of a very sexy pirate costume – “I was in love with my own incongruity – being a poetry-spouting college graduate in a pleather miniskirt. And I loved this notion of doing something at which I was entirely unsuited, and which seemed to go so much against my personality. I would never have said it at the time, but I very much believed I was above being a fun-loving pirate wench selling shots. I had read Meno and lived in cardigans and went to museums for fun. I was a terrific little snob who thought she knew everything, and subsequently, I was about to learn a great deal. … As ridiculous as it sounds, that was the first time I became aware that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life. It is astonishing that no one pointed this out to me sooner.“
• Libertarians: A matter of perspective
• The nexus of elite formation and higher education for American New Class – “The system of high school college placement and higher education itself induces fantastic risk aversion, and that is accelerating, in large part on account of grade inflation that leave students in high school (applying to college) and in the university compressed against a top grade – in which there is mostly room to fall and fail. When the median grade in the liberal arts is an A-, you mostly have only to go down and given the cost of the credential and its consequences – well in excess of any educational value in the liberal arts – you will act in the most risk averse, strategic way and take only classes in which you already know you will do at least that well. The analogue of risk aversion in higher education in real life is downward mobility.”
• Think Tanks Are Nonpartisan? Think Again – “One of the strangest institutions in Washington – and perhaps the hardest to comprehend from the outside – is the think tank, that quasi-academic, sort-of-political organization that offers, as its primary output, ideas. Universally, think tanks claim to be nonpartisan, and as tax-exempt nonprofits, this is a basic requirement in the tax code. But most people in Washington know the ideological leanings of think tanks that may obscure this fact in their titles: There’s the Cato Institute (libertarian), the Heritage Foundation (conservative), the Brookings Institution (moderate liberal) and the Center for American Progress (progressive).”

• CBO: Longest Period of High Unemployment Since Great Depression – “After three years with unemployment topping 8 percent, the U.S. has seen the longest period of high unemployment since the Great Depression, the Congressional Budget Office noted in a report issued today. And, despite some recent good news on the economic front, the CBO is still predicting that unemployment will remain above 8 percent until 2014. The report also notes that, including those who haven’t sought work in the past four weeks and those who are working part-time but seeking full-time employment, the unemployment rate would be 15 percent.”
• Over-regulated America – “The home of laissez-faire is being suffocated by excessive and badly written regulation. … Two forces make American laws too complex. One is hubris. Many lawmakers seem to believe that they can lay down rules to govern every eventuality. The other force that makes American laws complex is lobbying. The government’s drive to micromanage so many activities creates a huge incentive for interest groups to push for special favours.“
• The Case For Dying Broke – “In your 60s live off taxable accounts and your corporate pension. Leave your Social Security and IRA untouched until you’re 70. Deferring Social Security benefits buys you, in effect, an incremental inflation-protected annuity. Deferring the IRA cash-out makes tax sense. When you turn 70 put a third to a half of your money into fixed annuities, using the IRA. Most of the outlay should be for immediate annuities. A sliver should be used to buy an annuity that kicks in only if and when you reach age 80. That’s to keep up with inflation. For every dollar invested at age 70, a male can get 7.4 cents of immediate annual income or 20 cents of annual income starting a decade later. With your basic needs covered you can take big risks with the rest of your money. Put it in stocks and junk bonds.”

• Mandatory Drugs Tests by Record Companies, Media Scoldings, and Other Helpful Suggestions for Preventing Further Whitney Houstons – “One of Dr. Drew’s recent show guests suggested that record companies start mandatory drug testing. Drew [Pinsky] said ‘I love that.’”
• How much would (did) it cost to build the Death Star? – A LOT!
• Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids – “This overheated hostility toward public schools runs throughout the new literature on liberal homeschooling, and reveals what is so fundamentally illiberal about the trend: It is rooted in distrust of the public sphere, in class privilege, and in the dated presumption that children hail from two-parent families, in which at least one parent can afford (and wants) to take significant time away from paid work in order to manage a process—education—that most parents entrust to the community at-large. … Of course, no one wants to sacrifice his own child’s education in order to better serve someone else’s kid. … If progressives want to improve schools, we shouldn’t empty them out. We ought to flood them with our kids, and then debate vociferously what they ought to be doing.” Charles Murray, author of Coming Apart, agrees with the author, except he says that what school your kids attend doesn’t really matter. He sent his children to public schools.
• Home-schooling demographics change, expand – “There was a time when Heather Kirchner thought mothers who home-schooled their children were only the types ‘who wore long skirts and praised Jesus and all that.’ … Secular organizations across the country report their numbers are growing. Though government records indicate religion is still the driving force in home schooling, members of these organizations say the face of home schooling is changing, not because of faith, but because of what parents see as shortcomings in public and private schools.”

• The German-Style Board Game Revolution – “A Euro-style game fan I spoke to referred to Monopoly, Life, and the like as ‘Amero-trash games.’ Settlers of Catan originated in Germany, as did most of the rest of its ilk; Germans are famously crazy about board games, and mainstream German magazines often review games along with new movies and music releases.”
• Dictator Valentines – “Leon Trotsky thinks you’re hotsky“
• LAUSD Principal Focuses On Real Miramonte Criminals: The Children – “One of the many privileges of having kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District is the accelerated education they get in official corruption, the stupidity of grownups, union strong-arming and many other topics – any topics other than reading, writing and arithmetic, that is.”
• Why Italian Moms Are the Best – “Canadians make great moms. So do Ukrainians. Jewish moms can get in a ring with anyone, as can the Norwegians, the Tasmanians and the Kenyans. It all depends on your perspective. … Speaking from my own experience, I would argue that the best mothers are Italian-Americans, in part because they are warm and affectionate, but mostly because of the manicotti.”

• Obama’s Budget Proves He Should Not Be Reelected – “The [proposed FY2013] budget is as cynical an affair as last year’s offering, which was defeated 97-0 in the Senate – an act of rare bipartisan cooperation. Before we celebrate that moment of sanity, however, we recollect that the Senate has not passed a budget in more than 1,000 days, though they are required by law to do so. The White House blames this dereliction of duty on intransigent Republicans (a charge most recently leveled by Budget Director Lew over the weekend) but in reality all that is needed is a simple Senate majority to pass a budget, which the Democrats have. All this skirmishing is but B-rated play-acting. Informed citizens should be furious that the real issues clouding our future are not even addressed by our president. The crisis in our country is two-fold: a rising number of people receive ever-increasing assistance from the government. At the same time, fewer Americans are paying taxes. The inevitable outcome is a widening gap between revenues and outlays: the deficit. The recession has accelerated the problem.”
• iPhone dominates phone depreciation rankings
• Loopholes Allowed for Long Vegas Vacation – “In recent years, the lawmakers and staffers lucky enough to snag an invite to the annual Consumer Electronics Show were largely forced by House and Senate rules to limit their fun in Las Vegas to one day. But through the clever use of loopholes, this year, about a dozen Members and staffers (and family) were able to convert the convention into a four-day junket, with the Consumer Electronics Association still picking up the bulk of the tab. And it’s all within the rules.”
• What You Need to Succeed–and How to Find Out If You Have It – “Whether you succeed at work may depend on many factors—intelligence, empathy, self-control, talent and persistence, to name a few. But one determinant may outweigh many of these: how you perceive those around you. New research suggests that your own ability to get things done-not to mention your success in non-work relationships-is highly correlated with how you see others. Are your coworkers capable and kind, or are they, dare I say, incompetent jerks? It turns out that such opinions are tied to a key component of achievement called psychological capital, a mixture of efficacy (self-confidence), resilience (you believe you can bounce back from setbacks), hope (you believe you can achieve your goals) and optimism (you expect good things to happen in the future). As a concept, psychological capital reflects our capacity to overcome obstacles and push ourselves to pursue our ambitions. Not surprisingly, scoring high on this measure is linked to markers of success: being promoted, winning awards, popularity with peers, stability of marriage and even longevity.”
• Success in 7 Short Steps – “[C]ultivate a positive mindset through rituals and goals, say University of Nebraska management scholars Fred Luthans and Peter Harms. Here’s how: 1. Write a gratitude letter. 2. Seek out the good things in life. … 4. Put problems in perspective. … 6. Do nice things for others. … 7. Spend money on experiences, not objects.”

• The Boy Who Played With Fusion – “Shortly after his 14th birthday, Taylor [Wilson] and [Bill] Brinsmead loaded deuterium fuel into the machine, brought up the power, and confirmed the presence of neutrons. With that, Taylor became the 32nd individual on the planet to achieve a nuclear-fusion reaction.”
• The Admiring Ignorant – “It’s 12 years later now; if things go according to plan, I will soon earn tenure. And I’m wondering now if the 23-year-old master’s-degree student was perhaps uncharitable toward someone who might have known some things he didn’t. In terms of an academic lifetime, I’m still a relative newborn, yet I feel like I know a bit more about the frustration and exhaustion that might cause a college professor to wonder if he had wasted his life. I once received a paper wherein the student claimed that ‘John Lenin’ had used his career in the Beatles as a stepping stone to seize control of Russia; last year, I read a paper that advanced the idea that ‘back in the day’ – by which the writer meant the 1990s – people didn’t commit adultery, and homosexuality didn’t exist.”
• A failure of imagination put Metro on wrong track – “Believers in central planning should take a look at Washington’s Metro rail transit system. While they will find many things to like, they will also see examples of how central planners-and especially rail transit planners-can get things disastrously and expensively wrong. … The assumption of Metro planners was that jobs would continue to be heavily concentrated in downtown D.C. So there is no station serving Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia, which has become the largest office center between downtown Washington and Atlanta. Joel Garreau, in researching his book ‘Edge City‘ on Tysons and similar clusters, asked Metro planners why they didn’t put a station there. The reply: We never thought there would be any development there. Suburbs are for houses. But Northern Virginia lawyer named Til Hazel, who handled land acquisition cases on the Capital Beltway, figured it out. He bought big parcels in the triangle between the Beltway, Leesburg Pike and Chain Bridge Road, and made millions developing Tysons.” For more on Metro, see Unsuck DC Metro.
• The Forgotten Man of the Tax Debate – “The skills that make successful businessmen and investors are not spread equally among the population, and they certainly don’t coincide with the ability to win elections. Better to encourage investment by leaving cash in the hands of those who know how to use it. Even if tax rates have no incentive effects (although I’m sure they do), cash in the form of retained earnings is important, and too often overlooked. My family businesses don’t add much to the overall economic prosperity of our nation. They’re small, not terribly profitable, and are hardly giant engines for job creation or on the cutting edge of innovation. They do, however, employ nine family members throughout the year, with another dozen or so employees during the busy season. Without sensible tax rates on both labor and capital, we can’t build the equity we need to expand in good times and survive the bad times. That’s why tax rates matter. Since our situation is multiplied tens of thousands of times across our economy, from family restaurants to small trucking firms to the corner bodega, discussions of fairness, questions of incentives, and the proper rate of taxation should never neglect cash left in the hands of businesspeople. You can be sure that cash money is foremost in the minds of the people who are actually making the economic decisions that drive our economy.”
• Doll ‘protesters’ present small problem for Russian police – “Russian police don’t take kindly to opposition protesters – even if they’re 5cm high and made of plastic. Police in the Siberian city of Barnaul have asked prosecutors to investigate the legality of a recent protest that saw dozens of small dolls – teddy bears, Lego men, South Park figurines – arranged to mimic a protest, complete with signs reading: ‘I’m for clean elections’ and ‘A thief should sit in jail, not in the Kremlin’.”

hat tip What About Paris?

HT Zach Weiner

hat tip Richard Wiseman

“A Comedian Gives Us a Halloween Tax Video,” by Dan Mitchell, International Liberty, October 31, 2010

Taxes by Tim Slagle

Back at the G20 meetings in July in Toronto, there were numerous stories of police overreacting and arresting protesters with little reason whatsoever. Perhaps the most noteworthy story that got attention was the story of “Officer Bubbles,” the name given to a police officer, named Adam Josephs, who threatened to arrest a woman for assault if the bubbles she was blowing landed on him.
. . .
In the meantime, by filing this lawsuit, about the only thing that Office Bubbles has done is call a lot more attention to his initial actions and reinforce the idea that he seems to totally overreact to rather benign situations. But, I guess, if you’re going to arrest a girl for blowing bubbles in your direction, suing YouTube (for being a 3rd party platform) and suing people for mocking comments that no one actually believes probably seems to be equally intelligent.

Officer Bubbles Sues To Find Out Identity Of Anonymous YouTubers, by Mike Masnick, techdrit, October 18, 2010

“Officer Bubbles” Google search

“Officer Bubbles seeks damages from comments on how he acted,” by Chris McCormick, The Daily Gleaner, October 21, 2010

Also see “10 Rules for Dealing with Police”.

Smell like me:

TWiT Specials: The making of Old Spice’s commercial: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like

I didn’t say your name, but there were treasures inside…

You’ve got a 6-pack, I’ve got a keg. … Ladies don’t like sleeping on bricks, they like duvets and high thread counts:

Cat yodeling works better:

“The Sausage Your Sausage Could Taste Like”

AutoTune Remix